Английская Википедия:History of Santería
Шаблон:Short description Santería is an Afro-Cuban religion that arose in the 19th century.
Enslavement
After the Spanish Empire conquered Cuba, the island's indigenous Taino and Ciboney saw their populations dramatically decline.Шаблон:Sfnm The Spanish colonialists established sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations on Cuba and turned to the purchase of slaves sold at West African ports as a new source of labor for these plantations.Шаблон:Sfnm Slavery was then active in Spain,Шаблон:Sfn and was also widespread in West Africa, where those captured in war or deemed guilty of severe crimes were commonly condemned to enslavement.Шаблон:Sfn Enslaved Africans first arrived on Cuba in 1511.Шаблон:Sfn Once there, they were divided into groups termed naciones (nations), often based on their West African port of embarkation rather than their own ethno-cultural background;Шаблон:Sfn those who were Yoruba speakers, as well as Arara and Ibo people, were commonly identified as the "Lucumí nation".Шаблон:Sfn The United Kingdom had abolished slavery in the early 19th century and from the 1820s began patrolling the West African coast to prevent further shipments of slaves to the Americas. The trade nevertheless continued clandestinely, with Cuba continuing to receive new slaves until at least 1860.Шаблон:Sfn Full emancipation occurred on Cuba in 1886.Шаблон:Sfnm
Between 702,000 and 1 million enslaved Africans were brought to Cuba.Шаблон:Sfn The majority arrived in the 19th century,Шаблон:Sfnm in the wake of the late 18th century sugar boom.Шаблон:Sfn Most came from a stretch of Western Africa between the modern nation-states of Guinea and Angola.Шаблон:Sfnm The great plurality were Yoruba, from the area encompassed by the modern states of Nigeria and Benin;Шаблон:Sfnm the Yoruba had a shared language and culture but were divided among different states.Шаблон:Sfn Most adhered to a complex system of belief and ritual, now known as Yoruba traditional religion, that had developed among the Yoruba city-states.Шаблон:Sfn Much orisha worship was rooted in localised tradition, however certain orisha were worshipped widely, due in part to the extent and influence of the Yoruba-led Oyo Empire.Шаблон:Sfnm Enslaved West Africans brought their traditional religion with them to Cuba;Шаблон:Sfn some were from the priestly class and possessed knowledge of traditions such as Ifá.Шаблон:Sfn
In Cuba, these traditions adapted to the new social conditions of the enslaved population.Шаблон:Sfn While hundreds of orisha were worshipped across West Africa, fewer than twenty came to play a prominent role in Santería; this may be because many orisha were rooted in kin-based cults and thus were lost when traditional kinship networks and families were destroyed through enslavement.Шаблон:Sfn Oricha associated with the protection of agriculture also ceased to remain part of practices in Cuba, probably because enslaved Afro-Cubans had little reason to protect the harvests owned by the slave-owners.Шаблон:Sfnm Many of the myths associated with the oricha were transformed in Cuba, creating kinship relationships between different oricha which were not present in traditional West African mythologies.Шаблон:Sfn Over time, the imported traditional African religions transformed into Santería,Шаблон:Sfn a Cuban tradition that was evident by the end of the 19th century.Шаблон:Sfn
In Spanish Cuba, Roman Catholicism was the only religion that could be practiced legally.Шаблон:Sfn The Roman Catholic Church in Cuba made efforts to convert the enslaved Africans, but the instruction in Roman Catholicism provided to the latter was typically perfunctory and sporadic.Шаблон:Sfn Many Spanish slave-owners were uninterested in having their slaves receive Christian instruction, concerned that allowing the slaves to observe religious holidays or Sunday services would be detrimental to productivity.Шаблон:Sfn Most Roman Catholic priests were located in urban areas, away from the majority of the enslaved population who worked on rural plantations.Шаблон:Sfn
In Cuba, traditional African religions continued to be practiced within clubs and fraternal organizations made up of African migrants and their descendants.Шаблон:Sfn The most important of these were the cabildos de nación, associations modelled on Europe's cofradias which were sponsored by the Church and which the establishment regarded as a means of controlling the Afro-Cuban population.Шаблон:Sfnm These operated as mutual aid societies and organised communal feasts, dances, and carnivals.Шаблон:Sfn Cuba's Roman Catholic Church saw these groups as a method for gradual evangelisation, through which they tolerated the practice of some African customs while stamping out those they most fiercely objected to.Шаблон:Sfnm It was within the cabildos that syncretism between Roman Catholicism and African traditional religions took place,Шаблон:Sfn and where Santería probably first developed.Шаблон:Sfn Members identified traditional African deities with Roman Catholic figures such as Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, believing that these entities would assist people in their daily lives in return for offerings.Шаблон:Sfn
From 1790, Cuba's government increased restrictions on the cabildos.Шаблон:Sfn However, during the nineteenth century, their functions and membership expanded.Шаблон:Sfn In 1882 a new regulation was passed requiring each cabildo to obtain a new license to operate each year, and in 1884 they were prohibited from practicing on Christmas Eve or January 6.Шаблон:Sfn In 1888, the law forbade "old style" cabildos, after which many of these groups went underground, becoming some of the early casas de santo.Шаблон:Sfn Over time, various individuals of non-African descent also converted to Santería.Шаблон:Sfn Formally, these individuals were considered Roman Catholics, but their involvement in Roman Catholicism rarely extended beyond an initial baptism.Шаблон:Sfn
After enslavement
After slavery was abolished in Cuba there was a renewed push for independence from the Spanish Empire, an idea promoted by Cuban nationalists who emphasized cultural assimilation of the island's various ethnic groups to create a united sense of 'Cuban-ness'.Шаблон:Sfn While the country's Creole socio-economic elite sought to fuse different ethnic identities, they still expressed anxieties about the potential Africanisation of Cuba.Шаблон:Sfn After independence, Afro-Cubans remained largely excluded from economic and political power,Шаблон:Sfn while negative stereotypes about them remained pervasive throughout the Euro-Cuban population.Шаблон:Sfn Afro-Cuban religious practices were often referred to as brujería ('witchcraft') and linked to criminality in the popular imagination.Шаблон:Sfnm
Although religious freedom was enshrined in the Cuban constitution and Santería was never legislated against, throughout the first half of the 20th century various campaigns were launched against it.Шаблон:Sfn In 1876 a law was passed banning the Abakuá fraternal society, an Afro-Cuban religious group which had become widely associated with criminal activity.Шаблон:Sfn These were often encouraged by the press, who promoted allegations that white children were being abducted and murdered in Santería rituals;Шаблон:Sfnm this reached a fever pitch in 1904 after two white children were murdered in Havana in cases that investigators speculated were linked to brujería.Шаблон:Sfn The final decades of the 19th century had also seen growing interest in Spiritism, a religion based on the ideas of French writer Allan Kardec, which in Cuba proved particularly popular among the white peasantry, the Creole class, and the small urban middle-class.Шаблон:Sfn Ideas from Spiritism increasingly filtered into and influenced Santería.Шаблон:Sfnm
One of the first intellectuals to examine Santería was the lawyer and ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, who discussed it in his 1906 book Los negros brujos (The Black Witchdoctors).Шаблон:Sfnm He saw it as a barrier to the social integration of Afro-Cubans into broader Cuban society and recommended that it be suppressed.Шаблон:Sfnm In the 1920s, there were efforts to incorporate elements of Afro-Cuban culture into a broader understanding of Cuban culture, such as through the afrocubanismo literary and artistic movement. These often drew upon Afro-Cuban music, dance, and mythology, but typically rejected Santería rituals themselves.Шаблон:Sfn In May 1936, Ortiz sponsored the first ethnographic conference on Santería music.Шаблон:Sfn In 1942, Rómula Lachatañeré's Manuel de santería was published, representing the first scholarly attempt to understand Santería as a religion;Шаблон:Sfn in contrast to Ortiz, he maintained that the tradition should be seen as a religious system as opposed to a form of witchcraft.Шаблон:Sfn Lachatañeré was instrumental in promoting the term "Santería" in reference to the phenomenon, deeming it a more neutral description that the pejorative-laden terms such as brujería which were commonly used.Шаблон:Sfn
In Cuba and the diaspora: 1959–present
Marxist-Leninist policies
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 resulted in the island becoming a Marxist–Leninist state governed by Fidel Castro's Communist Party of Cuba. Much of the Afro-Cuban population was supportive of Castro's new administration, believing that they had the most to gain from the change.Шаблон:Sfn This administration espoused an expressly anti-racist position while retaining previous governments' focus on cultural integration rather than stressing and encouraging cultural difference among Cuba's ethnic groups.Шаблон:Sfn Castro's government saw any emphasis on a separate Afro-Cuban identity as being counter-revolutionary.Шаблон:Sfn Like other Marxist–Leninist states, it was committed to state atheism and to the ultimate eradication of religion, resulting in the government taking a negative view of Santería.Шаблон:Sfnm Practitioners continued to experience police harassment through to the 1980s,Шаблон:Sfn were denied membership of the Communist Party,Шаблон:Sfnm and faced limited employment opportunities.Шаблон:Sfn Santería practitioners required police permission to perform rituals, permission which was sometimes denied.Шаблон:Sfnm
In 1982, Cuba's government established the Departmento de Estudios Sociorreligiosos (Department of Socio-Religious Studies, DESR), which investigated Santería from a Marxist perspective, largely portraying the religion as a primitive survival of animism and magic.Шаблон:Sfn The DESR research found that while Christianity had declined in Cuba since 1959, Santería had not. Partly this was because the increased employment among Cubans following the revolution had allowed more individuals to afford the initiation fees.Шаблон:Sfn While taking a negative view of Santería, the state sought to adopt and promote many of the art forms associated with it in the hope of secularizing them and using them in the promotion of a unified Cuban identity.Шаблон:Sfn
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, at which Cuba lost its main source of international support, Castro's government declared that the country was entering a "Special Period" in which new economic measures would be necessary. In these years it selectively supported various traditional Afro-Cuban customs and traditions and legalised certain Santería practices. These measures were partly linked to a desire to boost tourism,Шаблон:Sfnm with Santería-focused tourism being called santurismo.Шаблон:Sfnm Afro-Cuban floor shows became common in Cuban hotels.Шаблон:Sfn Priests of Santería, Ifá, and Palo Monte all took part in government-sponsored tours for foreigners desiring initiation into such traditions.Шаблон:Sfn In 1991, the Cuban Communist Party approved the admission of religious members,Шаблон:Sfnm and in 1992 the constitution was amended to declare Cuba a secular rather than an atheist state.Шаблон:Sfnm The government's move away from the state atheism it previously espoused allowed Santería to leave behind the marginalisation it had faced,Шаблон:Sfn and throughout the 1990s Santería began to be practiced more openly in Cuba.Шаблон:Sfn
Growing Yorubization and transnational activity
The Cuban Revolution generated an exodus of many Cubans, who settled in other parts of the Americas, especially the United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela.Шаблон:Sfn Although initial waves of migrants were predominantly white and middle-class, by the Mariel boatlift exodus of the 1980s the migrants included larger numbers of Afro-Cubans.Шаблон:Sfn Santeria gained an interest among Cuban exiles as a Cuban cultural outlet exiles could find comfort in while living outside of Cuba. As well as being a Cuban religion that is less dogmatic and institutionalized than Catholicism.[1]
With an increased Cuban presence in the U.S., Santería began to grow in many large U.S. cities, where it was embraced both by Latino Americans but also European Americans and African Americans.Шаблон:Sfn For many African Americans, it was seen as a more authentically African religion than others available to them, especially when purged of European-derived Roman Catholic elements.Шаблон:Sfn For some of these individuals, it became a religious wing of the Black Power movement.Шаблон:Sfn During the mid-1960s, several African American practitioners established the Yoruba Temple of Harlem.Шаблон:Sfn
In the second half of the twentieth century, there was a growing awareness among santeros/santeras of the trans-national links that their religion had with other orisha-worshipping belief systems in West Africa and the Americas. This was accompanied by growing contact with other orisha-worshippers elsewhere.Шаблон:Sfn Collectively, these different movements were increasingly described as the "Orisha Tradition."Шаблон:Sfn This process was partly influenced by the 1957 visit to Cuba of the French photographer and ethnographer Pierre Verger, who promoted a pan-Yoruba theology.Шаблон:Sfn These transnational links were reinforced when the Ooni of Ife, a prominent Yoruba political and religious leader, visited Cuba in 1987.Шаблон:Sfnm Cuba's government permitted the formation of the Yoruba Cultural Association, a non-governmental organization, in the early 1990s.Шаблон:Sfnm In July 2003, Havana hosted the Eighth World Orisha Conference.Шаблон:Sfn Various practitioners of Santería made visits to Nigeria to study traditional Yoruba religion there.Шаблон:Sfn
The late twentieth century saw a growth in the yorubización ('Yorubization') of Santería, with attempts made to remove Roman Catholic elements from the religion and make it more closely resemble West African religion.Шаблон:Sfn This process was promoted at the International Workshop of Yoruba Culture, which was held in Cuba in 1992.Шаблон:Sfn Within Cuba, the Yorubization process was often attributed as reflecting the influence of practitioners in the United States.Шаблон:Sfn Cuban cultural nationalists were critical of the Yorubization process, viewing Santería's syncretism as a positive trait and arguing that advocates of Yorubization presented homogenous societies as superior to heterogenous ones.Шаблон:Sfn Many Santeros who opposed the reforms highlighted that even in West Africa, orisha-worship never foregrounded ideas of purity and exclusivity.Шаблон:Sfn The head of the Roman Catholic Church in Cuba, Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, also opposed the Yorubization process, believing that the Roman Catholic elements of Santería were a positive influence within the religion.Шаблон:Sfn The close of the twentieth century also saw adherents of Santería increasingly utilise the internet to promote the religion.Шаблон:Sfn
References
Citations
Sources
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